Impossibly dense, deep, and powerful, black holes reveal the limits of physics. Nothing can escape one, not even light.

But even though black holes excite the imagination like few other concepts in science, the truth is that no astronomer has actually seen one.

"There’s really strong evidence for them, and by now every astronomer believes confidently there are black holes," Peter Edmonds, a NASA astrophysicist, told me. "But there’s no direct image."

Any photo you've seen of a dark mass warping spacetime … well, that's just an illustration:

NASA/ Goddard
This is awesome. This is an illustration.
Why no astronomer has ever seen a black hole directly

The biggest problem with trying to detect a black hole is that even the supermassive ones are relatively tiny.

"The largest one in the sky [is] the black hole in the center of the Milky Way," Dimitrios Psaltis, an astrophysicist at the University of Arizona, writes me in an email. "And taking a picture of it would be equivalent to taking a picture of a DVD on the surface of the moon."

What's more, because of their strong gravity, black holes tend to be surrounded by other bright matter that makes it hard to see the object itself.

That's why, when hunting for black holes, astronomers don't usually try for direct observation. Instead, they look for evidence of the effects of a black hole's gravity and radiation.

"We typically measure the orbits of stars and gas that seem to circle around very dark 'spots' in the sky and measure how much mass is there in that dark spot," Psaltis says. "If we know of no other astrophysical object that can be so massive and so dark as what we just measured, we consider this as very strong evidence that a black hole lies there."
We do have indirect images of black holes, however

Some of the best indirect images of black holes come from the Chandra X-ray Observatory, where Edmonds works. "The friction and the high velocities of material forming out of a black hole naturally produces X-rays," he says. And Chandra is a space telescope specially designed to see those X-rays.

For example, the Chandra observatory documented these X-ray "burps" emanating from the merger of two galaxies around 26 million light-years away. The astrophysicists suspect that these burps came from a massive black hole:


more pics:

I read years ago that a scientist said we know so little about black holes that anything could be inside one, including a universe.

Fascinating..scary..but fascinating.

Op thought I heard them say the other night ...
when I watch this show that might be a special ever week now ...
we could be in a black hole...
I was a little skeptical
but the universe is huge ...
and all that we know ...
we could be looking out side of that hole ...
and when they talked about the sun ...
not sure if there will still be life on earth ...
by then but they said one of...
the main reasons they
where looking for a like earth planet ...
was becouse the sun...
will be kinda slowly exploding ...

i think it would be about resources and money more than anything...

Reminds me of the disney movie :)

Everything can be explosive, metals is not exception. then?.........